Editor’s note

TeleSUR English today reported on China’s strong support for North Korean leader Kim Jung Un’s “peace efforts on the peninsula”; and successes in constructing the country along socialist lines. The victory of North Korea at the United Nations sanctions committee meeting through the joint defence of China and Russia was also reported on. Black Opinion now republishes the article by TeleSUR English:

China and North Korea have announced a deepening of diplomatic ties and strategic cooperation a day ahead of the Chinese leader’s ‘historic visit’ to the upper peninsula, dampening United States attempts to peel away Chinese support toward the Korean nation.

On Wednesday, President Xi penned an op-ed for Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Korean Workers Party (WPK).

In the article, Xi pledged China’s support for Kim Jung Un’s approach to peace efforts on the peninsula.

“We are pleased to see that with Chairman Kim’s correct decisions and the concerted efforts of all parties concerned, the general trend of peaceful dialogue on the Korean Peninsula has taken shape, and a political settlement to the Peninsula issue sees a rare historical opportunity, which has been universally recognized and anticipated by the international community,” stated President Xi as translated by Global Times.

Chinese state media, CGTN, also reports, “China will firmly support Kim’s achievements in socialist construction by leading the WPK and the people through a new strategic route, focusing all his efforts on economic development and improving people’s livelihoods.”

Xi’s article was published the day before his first state visit to North Korea, and the first by any Chinese leader in 14 years.

On Tuesday, China and Russia jointly defended North Korea at a United Nations sanctions committee meeting and successfully blocked the U.S. from ​​​banning refined oil imports to North Korea. U.S. representaives accused the Korean nation of exceeding its limit of 500,000 barrels of refined oil agreed last year at by the U.N. members. However, China and Russia blocked the move, demanding the U.S. provide more robust evidence to its accusation.

The increasingly close ties between Xi and Kim may disappoint U.S. foreign policy analysts who had hoped China would pressure North Korea into backing down on a number of key issues on the penin.

Writing in 2013, Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow for the neo-conservative Cato Institute, noted that China was growing “frustrated” with Kim Jon Un’s government and U.S. foreign policy should be focused on exploiting the rift. “No one should be allowed to throw the region, even the whole world, into chaos for selfish gains,” Xi said several years ago regarding Kim’s governing style.

Yet, as diplomatic and trade tensions grow between the U.S. and China, as well as with North Korea, the two Asian countries are now presenting a united front.

“One can say this friendship is irreplaceable,” President Xi described the North Korea-China relationship in his WPK-published letter.

The post China & Russia show strong support for North Korea appeared first on Black Opinion.

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One afternoon last summer, my partner Rick called me out onto our deck to see a tiny hummingbird. Not just tiny, but the tiniest hummingbird he had ever seen. My curiosity piqued, I walked out and there it was – hovering in front of the bee balm, sipping nectar and beating its wings at an impossible rate. It was a rich rust color and about an inch and a half long. By comparison, the smallest ruby-throated hummingbirds are twice that length. This was truly the most diminutive hummingbird imaginable.

Or was it? When I first spotted it, I was certain it was not a hummingbird. It didn’t seem possible that in all my years of birdwatching, I had never seen this particular species, nor even heard of it. A one-and-a-half-inch-bird, after all, would be something of note. The kind of thing people spend their lives hoping to see, crowds gathering as word of a sighting spread. But the longer I watched it, the less sure I felt. It moved exactly like a hummingbird – hovering, sipping, furiously flapping. I wondered if we had stumbled upon a wayward bird far afield from its home somewhere in the tropics.

We had not. It was a moth.

More specifically, it was a hummingbird moth – a tiny trickster that sounds, acts, and looks much like its namesake. There are several species that fall into this family, known as the Sphingidae or sphinx. The most common in our area, and the one zipping around my garden, is the hummingbird clearwing moth (Hemaris thysbe). Another common species, the snowberry clearwing (Hemaris diffinis), tends to be more abundant in the West. (There is also a genus, Macroglossum, found in North Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is known as the hummingbird hawkmoth and has an epic migration, some of them flying from the Mediterranean and even North Africa to the United Kingdom.)

After the sighting in my garden, I did an internet search on “tiny hummingbird” and discovered that I was not the first person to be fooled. Looking at photos of the insect, I could clearly see it was just that – an insect and not a bird. What looks like a sliver of a beak is actually a proboscis that the moth plunges deep into blossoms for nectar. When not in use, it retracts into a coiled position. It also sports a pair of unbird-like antennae. Details that were hard to see as it flitted about the bee balm in the middle of a sun-drenched day.

Even in caterpillar form, the Hemaris thysbe is easy to mistake for something else. It’s a beautiful spring green, with spots along its sides and a horn on its rear end. In other words, it is almost identical to the tomato hornworm. “All caterpillars in the family Sphingidae have a horn at the rear end,” said biologist Beatriz Moisset, who writes about pollinators for the U.S. Forest Service. “They look similar to tomato hornworms, but feed on different plants, mostly honeysuckles, viburnums, snowberries, and a few others.”

I was relieved to learn this, as I have had an infestation of tomato hornworms two summers in a row and didn’t want to regret the fates they met at my hands. Turns out those garden decimators transform into five-spotted moths and not into the bird look-alikes checking out my bee balm.

Adult hummingbird moths first emerge in spring, but are most active in summer, when flowers such as bee balm and phlox are in bloom. Females lay eggs on the underside of leaves that the larvae eat, including honeysuckle and dogbane. When the caterpillars are full grown they drop to the ground, where they will spend the winter in cocoons. Leaf litter is essential to their survival.

“An immaculate lawn is a death sentence for any pupa laying there. So, if you can reduce the area you rake in the fall, you may be saving some of these beauties” said Moisset. I’ve never been particularly zealous about raking my lawn and now I am even less so.

The sighting last summer proved to be a singular event, but I am hopeful more will follow this year. The next time a hummingbird moth shows up in my garden, I won’t be fooled, but I will be delighted.

This content was originally published here.

This content was originally published here.